Monocausal attribution and its relationship with reasoning biases in schizophrenia

Attributional Styles and Social Functioning in Schizophrenia. Is the Learned Helplessness Model Suitable?

“…Connecting depression and psychosis, the Learned Helplessness Model (Abramson et al, 1978) and the Hopelessness Theory of Depression (Liu et al, 2015), provided an important framework for explaining the development of depressive symptoms through specific attributional patterns and had an initial use in the field of psychosis. These initial studies showed that persons with depression present an abolished "self-serving bias", often named "depressive realism", or a tendency to internalise blame for negative events (Moritz et al, 2007) and found the opposite pattern in persons with paranoid delusions, including an excessive tendency to attribute positive events to oneself and negative events to external causes, indicating an increased "selfserving bias" (Moritz et al, 2018). However, the way these biases influenced social functioning (SF) remained unexplored.…”

“…Given the importance of depressive symptoms (Berardelli et al, 2019;Davidson et al, 2018) and the increased "helplessness" (a bias to externalise both positive and negative events) found in persons with psychosis (Lincoln et al, 2010), the present study aimed to verify whether the reformulated Learned Helplessness Model and the more fully articulated form, Hopelessness Theory of Depression, may be specifically suitable to predict depressive symptoms in persons with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Moreover, our principal focus is not to demonstrate the relationship between attribution styles and psychotic symptoms that influent models satisfactorily explain (Bentall et al, 2001;Garety & Freeman, 2013;Moritz et al, 2018;Murphy et al, 2018) but to test their utility to explain increased depressive patterns and predict SF in persons with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. A crosssectional study was designed with the following objectives: 1) to compare attributional styles between a group of persons diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders vs. a non-clinical group; 2) to check possible relationships between attributional styles and the severity of depression, delusional beliefs, and other psychotic symptoms within the clinical group; and 3) to generate prediction models of SF through attributional dimensions.…”

“…The results presented here seek to update classical studies based on the theory of attribution from the learned helplessness model and should be put in the context of recent research. So, Moritz et al (2018) notice that, despite the heterogeneity of attributional styles, there is growing evidence to suggest that people with schizophrenia share a tendency to "monocausal" or one-sided attributions: they do not spread the potential causes for events across different factors ("myself", other persons or circumstances), confine the causal search to one predominant source (Mehl et al, 2014;Moritz et al, 2015), and is related to a widely studied reasoning bias such as "jumping to conclusions" (Moritz et al, 2018). The attributional style seems more "a thinking style" related to personality than a social cognition domain and it is associated with paranoid traits and not exactly with psychotic symptoms (Savla et al, 2013).…”

Prolonged rather than hasty decision-making in schizophrenia using the box task. Must we rethink the jumping to conclusions account of paranoia?

“…Cognitive biases-for example, deviances in attributional style (Kinderman and Bentall, 1996;Moritz et al, 2018), overconfidence in errors (for overviews see Hoven et al, 2019;Moritz and Woodward, 2006a), and a bias against disconfirmatory evidence (BADE) (McLean et al, 2017;Sanford et al, 2014;Woodward et al, 2008)-are implicated in the formation and maintenance of positive symptoms in schizophrenia. While the idea that reasoning/logical thinking is impaired in schizophrenia is quite old (see Jaspers, 1913, p. 97), systematic research into processes of reasoning did not begin in earnest until 30 years ago.…”

Apego, neurocognición y cognición social en el espectro de la esquizofrenia

“…En todo caso, la relación entre los estilos atribucionales y los síntomas psicóticos ha sido explicada satisfactoriamente por modelos Qirmemente establecidos en el campo de estudio Garety y Freeman, 2013;Moritz, Bentall, Kolbeck y Roesch-Ely, 2018). Por último, se ha sugerido que los individuos con psicosis establecen atribuciones "monocausales" y que éstas podrían jugar un papel importante en la patogénesis o, incluso, representar un factor de vulnerabilidad para la psicosis Randjbar, Veckenstedt, Vitzhum, Hottenrott y Moritz, 2011).…”